Stalin's Hammer: Paris: A Novel of the Axis of Time Read online

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  STALIN’S HAMMER

  PARIS

  A NOVEL OF THE AXIS OF TIME

  by

  JOHN BIRMINGHAM

  Published by John Birmingham

  PO Box 437

  Bulimba, Queensland 4171

  Australia

  First Edition published 2016

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  Copyright © John Birmingham, 2016

  Cover design by William Heavy

  Ebook formatting by Guido Henkel

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the author. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10% of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

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  Stalin’s Hammer

  More than a decade has passed since Admiral Kolhammer’s 21st-century battlefleet was dragged into a wormhole and thrown across oceans of time, emerging with disastrous consequences and shattering the history of the Second World War.

  Hitler and the Nazis have fallen, Kolhammer sits in the White House as Vice President, but Stalin rules half of Europe and Asia. The great Soviet engines of state power turn and burn to set history right. Not just the war, but all future time.

  Previous books in the Stalin’s Hammer series

  STALIN’S HAMMER: ROME

  In Rome with his lover, Julia Duffy, Prince Harry has to organize the defection of a Russian industrialist who has information about a space-based Soviet weapon that could destroy the balance of power between East and West.

  STALIN’S HAMMER: CAIRO

  Dispatched to Cairo to continue his investigation of the orbital weapons platform, Harry is drawn further into the dangerous world of espionage as he tries to save a German rocket scientist from Russian spies.

  PROLOGUE

  Camp 5, Cabanatuan

  21 June 1942

  They came like ghosts from the future, but Gracie wasn’t scared of them. She was something like a ghost herself, the way she spooked around the prison camp, running errands and messages for the women, avoiding the guards, hiding food and medicine from them, even sneaking into the hut where the Japanese kept their own supplies and stealing away with a tin of beans and a small bag of rice. She only did that once, though. When the Japanese found out somebody had stolen their food, they had been very angry and had done terrible things to the grown-ups. They had beaten the little girls and some of the boys with canes too, but what they did to the grown-ups was worse‌—‌so bad that for a long time Gracie was convinced it brought the ghosts.

  She was the first to see them.

  Some nights, when she could not sleep because she was too hungry or scared, she slipped out of the cot she shared with two other girls, and padded to the far end of the long hut. There was a loose floorboard near the second last bunk. She could easily lift the plank, using a knothole big enough for three of her fingers. It wasn’t even nailed down, and Gracie was so thin she could squeeze through the gap, dropping to the warm, damp soil underneath. There wasn’t enough room to get up on her hands and knees under the floorboards, but that was okay. It reminded her of the house where she’d grown up back home in Kansas, before Daddy had taken them all to Manila to help General MacArthur.

  She’d crawled around under that house too, even sleeping under there in summer with her dog, Boo. It made her happy to recall those days. She liked it under the hut in the jungle prison because the Japanese didn’t know she was there. It was almost as though she had escaped them and she could go anywhere and do anything she wanted. But she could only pretend, of course. Gracie knew that if she did escape, the guards would do terrible things again to everyone she left behind. She knew because they said they would and they were bad men. If they said they’d do a bad thing, you could believe them.

  The night the ghosts came she crawled right to the edge of the shadows, where the small verandah that surrounded the hut cut off the moving light from the guard tower. She would just watch the guards for a while, she thought. She would watch where they went. Perhaps she would count how long it took them to move from one place to another in the camp. That was a good game and it was useful sometimes to know those things, like when she had to carry a message or some food or medicine past the Japanese. It was always better to simply avoid them than to make up a lie explaining her presence in the wrong hut or some other place.

  She lay in the soft soil, ignoring the insects that crawled over her while she watched. When she had first left Kansas, and come here to the far side of the world, the insects had frightened her, but she wasn’t frightened of them anymore. She hardly noticed them and, besides, she had so many other things to be scared about. She was always frightened of getting in trouble with the guards, of being beaten or caned. She was frightened of getting sick, because lots of times when people got sick here they didn’t get better. She was really, really frightened that she would get everyone in trouble again if the grown-ups asked her to get more food or medicine. She wasn’t sure what she would do if they asked. But so far they hadn’t. Not since last time.

  These fears gnawed away like the hunger pains in her stomach. They were constant, but mostly dull. The fear that sometimes came upon her like a Kansas storm, boiling up quickly out of clear blue skies, was the fear she had for her parents. They weren’t in Camp 5 with her. Gracie had no idea where they might be and sometimes, if she let herself think about it, she could go all but crazy with worrying that she would never see them again. When she was very sad, which was often, Gracie thought it was best not to think about them at all, because when she did, her thoughts ran away from her, with a wolf on their heels. But if she didn’t think about them, sometimes she found it hard to remember all of the things that made them Mommy and Daddy and that was even worse.

  It was best, she had found, to imagine her parents playing a game with her. Watch the guards. Count the steps. Guess where they will turn up next. Daddy would love that game, and Mommy would be so pleased that Gracie was good at it. Her mother always told her to be the best at everything she did.

  “Charlotte-Grace,” she would say, “you must always do your best at everything. You do not need to be the best. Just your best.”

  So
Gracie liked to play the watching game on nights like this, and imagine her parents watching her. That was how she saw the ghost.

  At first, of course, she did not actually see the ghost. She could only see what happened when he came. One of the guards was slowly marching up and down outside the wire, the moonlight glinting on the hooked bayonet of the rifle he carried at his shoulder. Gracie was counting his footsteps. Thirteen steps from the corner to the bushes with the bright red flowers. You couldn’t see the flowers in the dark, of course, but she knew they were there. Another ten steps to the big anthill. Fourteen steps beyond that to the little hand-painted sign with the pirate flag on it. The guard would turn at that point, because the skull and crossbones meant there were landmines. He would retrace his steps, while Gracie counted them.

  Fourteen to the anthill.

  Ten to the red flower bush.

  Thirteen…

  But the guard did not return to the corner post. He seemed to disappear into the night, as though the jungle shadows had grown hungry watching him and they had…

  The shadows had snatched him away.

  Fast. So very fast. And quiet too. Because shadows don’t make noise.

  Gracie blinked and nearly rubbed her eyes, trying to make sense of what she had just seen, or not seen. Then she remembered how dirty her hands got under the hut and she cleaned them on her tattered shirt before blinking again and carefully rubbing just one eye with the palm of one hand. She had learned that trick here under the hut too. Do not blind yourself. If you have to rub your eyes, do it one at a time, carefully. And don’t rub dirt in there. The dirt here had lots of germs.

  She expected to see the guard again when she next looked, but he was gone‌—‌disappeared as completely as her mother and father. Swallowed by the night.

  And then she saw the ghost.

  At first it was just a darker patch of night moving at the edge of the jungle. Then it took the shape of a man. The dark figure floated over from the edge of the jungle and kneeled in front of the tall barbed-wire fence, just before the flower bush.

  Gracie nodded.

  The ghost was smart.

  Gracie knew that part of the fence could only be seen from the small exercise yard in front of it. The view from the guard tower was blocked by a water tank on the roof of Hut 23. The guards in the main compound could not see the fence because two other huts blocked their view. That’s why there was always a guard marching up and down that line of fence, night and day.

  But now the guard was gone and the shadow kneeled at the fence, doing something to the wire. The cry of night birds, the bark of the fire lizards and the many sounds of the jungle were so loud that she could not hear what happened next, but she did not need to. Gracie knew. The ghost was cutting through the wire.

  Her heart swelled like a water balloon filled too quickly, growing so big and full so fast that she thought it might burst. For one mad moment she thought it must be her daddy, come for her, but she was not silly and she put that thought away. Her daddy was not coming, no matter how much she might want him to. More ghosts emerged from the darkness of the jungle and she could see now that they were men. They carried guns. Their heads looked strangely misshapen, as though tiny machines grew from them; binoculars or telescopes, she imagined.

  Gracie would have been scared, but she had seen the ghost make the Japanese guard disappear. She knew that the guard would not be coming back, just like her parents, and she wormed herself into the moist, dark soil of the jungle prison camp, letting it enfold her in a hug, clenching her fists and smiling at the ghosts with guns and telescopes for eyes. Her smile grew positively vulpine when the night exploded into fire.

  ###

  Gracie did not emerge from her hiding place until the morning sun was high and hot enough to raise wispy tendrils of mist from the pools of rainwater that lay about the camp. It rained almost every day, always in the afternoon. In the mornings, as the terrible heat built up, most of the puddles evaporated, but they never dried out completely and Gracie always looked as though she was wearing dark socks from the mud which clung to the bottom half of her legs. The sun came up as always that morning too, but not all the pools of monsoon water evaporated in the usual way. Some were stained deep red with blood and these dried into a sticky brown sludge that even she would not like to walk through.

  The ghost soldiers, as she thought of them, even though she knew now that they were not ghosts, had killed or captured all of the Japanese very quickly. They were very brave. She had watched as one of them stood perfectly still while an angry Japanese officer charged at him with a sword. Everyone was terrified of the sword. The officer, a Lieutenant Onishi, had used it to chop the heads off some Australian soldiers when Gracie was first in the camp. But the ghost was not scared, possibly because Lieutenant Onishi’s pyjama pants were falling down, somewhat ruining the fearsomeness of his banzai charge. The ghost seemed to regard Onishi with real interest for a moment, and then his strange-looking gun fired and Lieutenant Onishi’s head came right off, just like the Australians’ had.

  Gracie had to smile at that. It was funny how things worked out.

  The fighting was over long before the sun peeked above the tree line. Gracie had to crawl around under the hut to watch it all. After the ghost soldiers came through the wire, not much happened in that part of the camp. To see the fighting she had to belly crawl all the way to the other end of the hut where she had a much better view of the main compound. She could see the guard tower from there, or most of it anyway. She dared not get too close to the edge of her hiding place. More than once she saw bullets chewing up the earth just in front of where she lay. But she also got to see the hated tower brought down in a roaring explosion, bigger and louder, and much better, than any fireworks she had ever seen. Not too long after that she heard heavy boots on the floorboards above her, and more guns firing, and the women screaming and guards yelling. But that didn’t last very long.

  More soldiers came. They arrived in the strangest airplanes, which had no wings and the biggest propellers you could ever imagine right on top of them. They sometimes hovered in the air like hummingbirds but she knew they were warplanes because every now and then they would roar away and shoot machine guns and even rocket bombs into the jungle. Gracie could feel the explosions in her chest, through the ground. The terrible force of them was just like an earthquake, or even a volcano. She had seen a volcano once, when she first flew to Manila with her parents. It had been a long way away, but even seen through the window of their plane it was very scary.

  Gracie did not reveal herself when the fighting was over. Not at first. What if the Japanese came back? She knew that the guards in the camp were not the whole of the Emperor’s army. And they weren’t his best soldiers either. Not at all. There were thousands of Japanese army men on this island alone. Maybe millions! The ghost soldiers could not fight them all. And so Gracie remained hidden for many hours until she was certain the Japanese were not coming back.

  Once or twice she heard the women and some of the other children calling for her and she almost went, but you did not just drop the habits of survival like an old towel. She even heard some of the ghost soldiers, revealed now to be men and women‌—‌women!‌—‌calling for her but she stayed curled up in the dirt, content to watch and wait. As amazing as their rescue was, she made other intriguing discoveries as the hours went by. She watched, disbelieving, as a black woman barked orders at two white men and they jumped to her command.

  That was partly why she stayed hidden.

  It was all too much to take in. There was part of her which simply could not believe it was happening.

  It was only when she smelled food, real food, for the first time in months that she was tempted out of hiding. The newcomers had set up a little kitchen and a team of cooks in oddly patterned uniforms heated giant pots of soup and baked fresh loaves of bread.

  Well not really fresh, she thought, as saliva squirted into her
mouth. They didn’t roll the dough like her mother would.

  “Charlotte-Grace, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing properly.”

  She had observed one of the cooks taking the white, doughy, uncooked loaves from a big cardboard box before putting them into an oven. These strange people brought an oven to the jungle? Would their wonders never cease?

  “Gracie!”

  She flinched from her name, scuttling right back under the hut, into the safety of the shadows. But they had seen her‌—‌Mrs Ritherdown specifically‌—‌and there was no escaping once you fell under her gaze. She was a nurse and nearly as fearsome and scary as the guards.

  “Gracie, you come out here right now. You’ve had us worried sick, young lady. Come on. Out you come.”

  And out she came. Out of the darkness and into the day where impossible machines hovered in the sky, and bread rolls baked, and soup bubbled in a pot and Mrs Ritherdown fussed over her and told her off and brushed her down and announced to everyone that she was found and she was safe.

  Now that Gracie was revealed and pulled directly into the mad rush and swirl of events, the full scale of what had happened broke over her like a big wave at the beach. The camp was a scorched and half-demolished ruin. Their former guards had been put to work digging a giant hole into which the bodies of more guards would presumably be dropped. They were piled high in an obscene mound near the charred wreckage of the guard tower.

  More of the Japanese, including the camp commandant, Colonel Tanaka, stood glumly on the other side of the pit, guarded by giant soldiers in uniforms Gracie had never seen before. She was confused. The soldiers had American flags on their uniforms, but wore German helmets. There was no missing the distinctive coal bucket shape of them. They were Americans though, no doubt of it. She could tell from the voices. Plus, as best she knew, there were no black or Asian soldiers in the German army. She wasn’t sure about the Asian ones, but she knew for sure there were black soldiers who drove trucks and things for America. Apparently they did secret stuff like this, too.